LOGICOMIX - Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou - Graphic Novel

There isn't much competition in the class of graphic novels about mathematics. Even so, LOGICOMIX is a meta-graphic novel about mathematics, which is rather unnecessary--the interludes in which the storytellers, inkers, artists, and mathematician consultants gather around and pontificate about various directions for their loose biography of Bertrand Russell seem stagy and coy, whereas the lives of the mathematicians themselves are sometimes tossed off too quickly and incidentally. The mathematics needs room to breathe, and tossing off years like calendar pages to show the agony that went into Russell and Whitehead's magnum opus unavoidably compresses the scope of their achievements.

The conceit of the work is that Russell, a logician-cum-pacifist, is giving a speech on logic at a university beset by pacifist protestors. Russell convinces them to hear his speech before he will agree to lend his support to their cause, and his speech becomes an oral history of his life and mathematical journey, even delving into his marital difficulties and alienating childhood. The university audience is almost completely forgotten, as the major players of twentieth-century mathematics are brought onstage to allude to their discoveries and provide fascinating and tortured mannikins who stalk the page with their madnesses and mathematical miracles in tow.

What these mathematical miracles really are is hard to say, as the format makes it particularly difficult to go into the mathematics with any depth. (At the same time as this reading, I was also in the midst of David Foster Wallace's book on infinity, which has many of the same players but much more room for academic complexity, which was greatly appreciated.) But, I have to consider audience, and it's true that many readers will be glad that the nuts and bolts of proofs are left out of the speech bubbles. Had I been reading this at twelve, I would undoubtedly have been excited and prompted to seek out the original texts referenced, which would have been a great boon for a budding mathematician. Providing this impetus may be the primary goal for LOGICOMIX in which case its mission is admirable, and I believe it would succeed.

But while the mathematics is glossed over in parts, the salacious bits are also handled with kid gloves and packed away quickly. Russell's parents' polyamory, Russell's love for Whitehead's younger wife, the man's own four wives, and his agonizing courtship of Alys, his first wife, and brushed over; Russell's family's bouts with schizophrenia are oft-mentioned but shown in-scene only twice. Russell's own son was schizophrenic, and his granddaughter burned herself alive; for all the time that LOGICOMIX's creators spend mulling over the themes of madness, they could have gussied up the story with a little more of this flashy human interest. Life isn't all mathematicians' conferences and invited university lectures.